Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which Linux terminal emulator do you prefer and why?

82 pointsendorphine146 comments

I was thinking that the terminal emulator of my Debian installation is one of the most unknown yet widely used tools of my setup. I know my editor, window manager and shell better than my terminal emulator.

Currently I use urxvt on Debian. But I'm not sure why - it wasn't a conscious choice. I think it comes by default with i3 or something.

Anyway, Linux users, which terminal emulator would you suggest and why? (I'm on Debian in case that makes a difference.)

View on HN

Kitty is an amazing terminal if you are willing to spend some time to learn and customize it. Take a look at the screencast on its website, it is super powerful and will make your coworkers and friends jealous.

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

Kitty and Alacritty miss one feature which is key to me: assigning a separate color to bold face.

I read a lot of output that only has bold face markup, like man pages or top output. They are way easier to read if bold face stands out more than, well, just thicker letter strokes.

So I'm stuck with xfce4-terminal.

Those terminals support bold rendered using ANSI bright colors as a config option and then you can set the ANSI brights to whatever custom colors you prefer.

Many thanks! I'll try this.

> if you are willing to spend some time to learn and customize it.

What do you take time to learn/customize about kitty?

I think the major benefit of why I stuck with kitty is that it removes somewhat the need for tilix and tmux, and also integrates nicely if you have a tiling wm only on one system but not the other (networked multihead, anyone?).

The kitty.conf [1] is pretty powerful and allows a lot of customizations. It also has emoji support so you can make everything pretty in your PS1 :D

[1] https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/

I don't like how intrusive kitty is. The "shell integration", "remote control", ssh's "kittens" makes feel uneasy from a security standpoint. Maybe I'm just being paranoid :p

I thought about forking it into a "skinny kitty". But there are so many good ttys nowadays that I the effort is not worth it.

Another option would be to sandbox with linux namespace and capabilities. Not sure how feasible it is.

Kitty does has a lot of cool features though -- most I don't care about.

I feel the same way, yet I still use it.

I would love a fast terminal that supported the tmux-like splits/panes and flexible keybindings and dropped all the exotic stuff. In particular, the custom termcap stuff I have to do with kitty when ssh-ing is enough to motivate me to switch.

Vanilla xterm.

It uses a lot less resources than any other emulator. Thomas Dickey keeps it updated. It has an unusual, but usable scroll bar. You can configure cut-n-paste to help you with command line work. You can change what a "word" is for cutting/copying to include /, ., *, so working with Unix file names is easier.

Additionally, xterm starts quickly, has an incredibly responsive feel (the latency from keyboard press to a character appearing is lower than any other terminal emulator I've used) and looks absolutely stunning with a nice bitmap font.

Agree xterm is a great terminal. It supports Unicode and all kinds of font and style configurations, uses few resources, and is really fast. Personally I found it to be the most responsive, better than (u)rxvt and st.

I use plain xterm as well. With 6x13 aka 'fixed' bitmap font.

Clean, simple, fast. I don't want background images, or transparency, or beautifully rendered fonts: I want to be able to clearly distinguish characters with minimum mental/visual effort, and pack as many of them into the available screen real-estate as I can see.

I also turn off color highlighting, which I don't find useful (in a shell).

My prompt is a simple '> ': no directory, no git, no venv -- I don't need to have that in my face all day long.

Years ago, I also chose an unusual color scheme: yellow text and dark blue background. This is based on the observation that human visual acuity peaks in the yellow/orange, and troughs in the blue, and so yellow on blue takes the least effort to see.

With `pwd`, `gb` and `gs` why do I need prompt taking up horizontal space?

zsh has a built-in feature which shows the cwd aligned to the right end of the prompt line. It even disappears if you happen to type far enough into the line.

This is an underappreciated zsh feature for sure.

Just a note, but the sensitivity of human vision depends on the amount of light but generally peaks in the green/yellow, not the yellow/orange. This is actually the reason why some countries have changed the paint of emergency vehicles from red to greenish, they are much easier to see especially in the dark where we perceive red to be largely black.

https://www.olympus-lifescience.com/en/microscope-resource/p...

Not sure if you'll see this, but what are the hex colors of the fg/bg? That sounds really interesting.

xterm too, not for any special reason than it seems to be highly compatible (well, AFAICT it is basically a de-facto standard for all X terminals), very responsive, opens instantly and has zero frills.

I mainly use Window Maker but whenever i use KDE (in other PCs mainly) i use konsole because it is just there.

TBH my requirements for a terminal are minimal - a generous scroll back history, decent responsiveness and the ability to configure the window to remove any unnecessary frills (scrollbar aside) and i'm fine.

+1 xterm. Terminal boot time is the only thing that matters to me when I open hundreds of them a day.

Moi aussi.

I usually launch my xterms from icons on the panel/taskbar/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. Doing that actually launches scripts that use whole sets of specific parameters for the new xterm window.

Thus, 'goroot' sets a largish xterm (115 x 58) with a right-hand scrollbar and reverse color and logs into the 'root' user. If you don't enter the root-user's password it will abort and disappear.

And 'read.news' runs nothing but a text-based usenet-reader in an xterm, and has extra code to prevent more than one instance running.

You actually use usenet? why?

Once upon a time, Usenet was THE reason I was connected to the Internet.

These days, Usenet is a mere shadow of itself but many of the purely technical newsgroups still survive.

Because I am an 8-bit CP/M enthusiast, I obviously subscribe to comp.os.cpm, but I also subscribe to some 'newer' active newsgroups like alt.os.linux.mint, and comp.os.linux.misc.

Unfortunately, the other eight newsgroups I am subscribed to might have only one or two posts per year, if they're lucky.

foot - https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot

  Fast, lightweight and minimalistic Wayland terminal emulator.
  Features:
    * Fast
    * Lightweight, in dependencies, on-disk and in-memory
    * Wayland native
    * DE agnostic
    * Server/daemon mode
    * User configurable font fallback
    * On-the-fly font resize
    * On-the-fly DPI font size adjustment
    * Scrollback search
    * Keyboard driven URL detection
    * Color emoji support
    * IME (via text-input-v3)
    * Multi-seat
    * Synchronized Updates support
    * Sixel image support

Came here to say this. nvim +term in tmux in foot.

Also came here to say foot. Hands down the best terminal I've used.

Kitty was alright but I prefer a bitmap font in terminals and I'd rather have one that just lets me use it without having to do tricks which you have to do with Kitty.

Alacritty is also good but I don't care about X support at all.

Switched from alacrity to foot, very very pleased.

Konsole is the default on KDE. Everything is near perfect except for an escape to classical Xterm three mouse button behavior for start to finish text sequence highlight. That right mouse button for context menu can be pushed off to Meta-Button-3. I never use the context menu but highlight text start to finish all the time. Very long web addresses with inserted prefix symbol sequence on line continuation Konsole could be smart enough to autoclean. A poleposition race among the terminal emulators to decide which is fastest and complete would be useful to check frequently.

Forgive my ignorance, but what are big differences between terminal emulators that push people to one vs another?

Does making use of terminal multiplexer, like tmux or GNU screen, make some of those differences less important?

I mostly use whatever terminal emulator is on my system. Currently that's xfce4-terminal. But I use GNU screen so I only ever have one terminal window open and I almost exclusively use the keyboard shortcuts for GNU screen instead of terminal shortcuts.

Several people mentioned Kitty, so I looked at the screencast on the Kitty website to see what features Kitty has. While it has some neat features, like showing the current directory or the currently running command, I'm pretty sure that running tmux or GNU screen would break those features and most others.

So it looks to me like you can use a fancy terminal emulator with cool features, or you can use a terminal multiplexer (tmux or GNU screen), but the two don't mix.

I use Kitty with Tmux, no reason you can't. It's still a fast and simple terminal even without the other features.

I have 3 to 10 terminals open per virtual desktop on average.

Screen/tmux lives inside each of them with 99.9% chance.

I've chosen my terminal because it looks better, and renders font beautifully, and it is fast.

I look at a terminal for hours a day, so looks matter. And there are several cli tools where I can see Gnome's built-in terminal lag.

Other factors include whether it has built-in multiplexer so you don't have to deal with tmux, and picture-in-terminal support

WezTerm! Minimal, fast, cross platform-first approach, easy to configure.

I use it on macOS and Linux with essentially the same configuration file, no issue at all.

And the maintainer is a cool human being, which is always a plus.

Ditto on the developer. Though the software is excellent too.

Alacritty, because the config is simple YAML and it can display with zero window embellishments or other UI. It's great for tiling window managers in particular.

The font rendering is great and you can adjust padding, margin, etc. to tweak readability for your tastes. I'm a fan of plain background with good contrast color, larger than normal font, and a clean one character wide padding around the terminal. It feels a lot like a web browser display. I hate terminals that go for the smallest possible font and super dense output.

It's not supported ligurature. It's only problem i have.but I'm still using alacritty.

Terminator for a couple years now, because it has native support for split windows and is otherwise pretty good.

tmux is great, but it essentially breaks multi-line text selection (you end up selecting bits of text from an adjacent pane), an update in any pane will cancel text selection in any other pane, and mouse wheel scrolling doesn't work.

Terminator solves those issues and also has great unicode/IME support -- I can type Chinese directly into the terminal.

> tmux is great, but it essentially breaks multi-line text selection (you end up selecting bits of text from an adjacent pane), an update in any pane will cancel text selection in any other pane, and mouse wheel scrolling doesn't work.

Typically you let tmux handle the text selection and clipboard management under these circumstances, which fixes all the text selection issues you mention. You can also enable scroll wheel support in tmux! Idr if it requires a plugin or something, but I have it in my config somewhere.

I use Konsole when I use Plasma and urxvt when I use Xmonad. Konsole is a no-brainer, it comes with the desktop environment and I like the ctrl+/ctrl- shortcuts to change the font size.

urxvt is more customizable, when I feel like it (that's also the case for Xmonad, now that I think about it).

I'm using tilix with tmux inside. tilix can be configured to not have any window manager decoration and have quake mode (drop-down terminal) it's my replacement for guake that wasnt working nice with Wayland. you can also put it in fullscreen and it'll stick to it in quake mode - the preferred way to use terminal for me

Also it has multiple sub windows, separate colors for bold/italics/etc, and all of VTE's gimmicks.

Gnome Terminal because it's the default in Ubuntu and does what I need. I should give a try to kitty after I read about it here on HN weeks ago.

https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/

I want to second this! Wez term has great support for fonts, including ligatures, and it's configured/scripted via Lua; pretty neat. It's got a great ssh mode, too (with `wezterm ssh...`). It's got many great features.

On Mac I currently use https://www.warp.dev/ and I love the editor prompt feature! The search/ai is helpful sometimes (I use fish, so a bit less so, but fish makes up for it), and the cheat-sheet/template feature (forgot the name now) is cool, too!

urxvt. It's very fast. I do a non-scientific benchmark of 'time find ~'. After repeats I see: urxvt=3.86s, alacritty=4.25s, kitty=7.62s, xterm=14.04s. (That xterm time feels suspect, I remember it being faster)

Mostly it was an improvement over xterm. I setup runtime font size change, a perl script to open new terms in the same working directory, and scroll bar the way I like.

On my newer setup for wayland I settled on alacritty (kitty was a competitor, X terms were out because fractional scaling results in blurry fonts). Neither option has a scrollbar which sucks, but I was able to get similar feature parity to urxvt.

I'm surprised I had to scroll this far down for even the slightest mention of urxvt. It feels like it was the One True Terminal for minimal desktops at one point, yet it's taken a backseat in the terminal wars. I'm sure it's mostly due to its default configuration trying to emulate xterm, making it behave and feel ancient.

It's extremely efficient and surprisingly powerful with its perl scripting and plethora of extensions using it. I keep finding out about functionality I didn't know about, and much like vim, my usage of it has been evolving over the years. It really has no shortcomings to me, and I wish I could keep using it properly in Wayland. Everything else just feels either too tacky with its game-changing features or too minimal.

I use tmux for all 'advanced' functionality, like scrollback and copy/paste, so I'm not picky as long as performance is good and basic features are present. The one thing is that I like to use a fullscreen dropdown terminal, so I do use Yakuake on KDE-based environments and Guake on GNOME-based ones.

Terminator, every single time. Was a godsend when I was in Ops.

Yakuake. You're easily spoilt by a quake mode terminal and it's hard to go without it. Tab management and shortcuts are great. Full utf8 support.

It's essentially the same as Konsole, all the internals are shared libraries.

That all said, dunno how it would fly with a tiling window manager.

I use Yakuake with the Awesome tiling window manager and as long as you add it to the rule for floating clients in your rc.lua it works perfectly.

urxvt because of how light it is and because of its extensions, particularly the one for controlling the cursor with the keyboard. I often use it to do quick impromptu searches of the output of previous commands or to copy something. I also like the pseudo-transparency extension.

Emacs with eshell for the most part.

If I need something else, I'll use whatever comes with the DE, typically gnome term. It's alright. I don't mind it. It doesn't excite me.

I used cool retro term for a week or two there for the nostalgia and it was nice but a bit much for daily work.

eMacs/eterm is a very pragmatic choice. Having the terminal be supported anywhere eMacs runs should make for a very consistent experience.

Which is the great thing about having as many different systems exist in emacs, such as calendar, email, etc.

However, the best thing about eshell is easily the fact that it will run lisp code. The same code that you use to program the editor can be used in shell commands.

Great video should anyone be interested in eshell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1f2tulD9N8

gnome-terminal, universally installed, got the job done for me.

tried kitty xterm konsole lxterminal(nice fonts) over the years, the default one wins.

the gpu-based term(e.g. kitty) does have a nice feature, it can display images just like the old xterm, i hope gnome-terminal can do that one day.

I was a happy urxvt user for years, but switched to Alacritty[1] about a year or so ago. My main reasons for switching were wanting better emoji support (urxvt handles Unicode admirably, but not emoji) and wanting a better configuration language (I hate writing Xresource rules).

I don't believe it's had a 1.0 release yet, but it's been stable in my use cases, and (perceptively) performant.

[1]: https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty

Konsole, and yakuake as its Quake-like version. It comes with the Plasma desktop and it has all features I need plus a million more. And it's reasonably fast.

Quake-mode (being able to hide/show with a global hotkey) is a required feature for me, and yakuake is one of the few that support it. I have no idea how anyone gets any work done without being able to quickly get to a terminal.

Funnily enough, on Windows their new Terminal supports it also if you dig in the settings a bit. That gets me through the work day, when I'm stuck on Windows.

The new windows terminal has quake mode? Now that's a game changer.

> Funnily enough, on Windows their new Terminal supports it also if you dig in the settings a bit.

Can you permanently resize it? Last I tried it, it was slow and I didn't see how to make it fullscreen or behave predictably on multimonitor setups, so I couldn't actually use it.

Whatever settings I've done, there's one button to make it appear/disappear, and it's very quick. I don't do mine fullscreen though, I prefer just a corner. It stays whatever size I tell it to, I'd assume that can be most of the screen. Also I've turned on "focus mode", which gets rid of the huge titlebar. I use tmux inside of it so I don't need its tab bar or anything either.

Yakuake is my daily tool for development. I have tried other Quake-like terminal emulator like Guake on Gnome, but Yakuake is the best for me.

Alacritty,Because It's fast & minimal. If you want ligurature support & many features you can use kitty.

I use Alacritty because it's easy to configure and low maintenance. It's missing two features I'd love to have: ligatures and inline images. Ligatures are not important enoguh to switch and inline images won't work in tmux (tried it with wezterm and kitty) so I guess I'm stuck.

Alacritty has forks that supports ligatures. I use https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/alacritty-ligatures-git You can also take a look at https://github.com/fee1-dead/alacritty/tree/ligatures_harfbu...

I use Kitty because it’s incredibly quick (especially with the -1 flag). I use a tiling window manager and can flood my screen with dozens of terminal windows in under a second.

Probably not a big deal for most, but I mostly live in the shell.

Kitty isn’t the best feature wise though. Even config changes are tedious.

I use xterm. (However, there are some problems with it such as the pieces of big Sigma cannot be displayed (I think because it uses Unicode for conversion; you cannot just use fonts with the specific encodings directly, which I would prefer it to do), and some other problems; but it also has some advantages such as using Xaw and using bitmap fonts.)

Maybe some time, I can write a better one, possibly. (One idea I have also is a kind of "secure universal escape", which might possibly use /proc file system if necessary, that would ensure that the state of the terminal is correct after the prompt is returned (and possibly also to check that the prompt is not being faked). The other idea is to not use Unicode.)

I prefer my own, that I wrote. But then I would. (-:

I discovered alacrity when I first learned rust and have stuck with it. It has good performance, despite possible exaggerations or regressions, good compatibility, a big enough scrollback, and real transparency. All my most important features YMMV

Tilix, basically a much more being able to do splitting etc from the GUI, and pretty standard Gtk view.

It has optionally has CSD, which I'm a fan of (I know many are not, but I kind of like widgets in the toolbar, going buck to Amipro, and later Winamp)

I like Terminology. It has some pretty cool features as shown here: https://www.enlightenment.org/about-terminology.md

I use terminator.

Ctrl+Shift+vErtical Ctrl+Shift+hOrizontal

I just run Terminator in a window maximized and the above shortcuts and Ctrl+D when necessary are more than enough.

I used to use Guake for a long time, then when I was looking for an alternative with less dependencies, I found Tilda (https://github.com/lanoxx/tilda), which is very similar.

I've used KDE for decades before switching to Awesomewm, so still use Konsole (and Dolphin for that matter). In particular I like having the tabs row along the bottom, detection of URLs with the option to open, and the reasonably clean look stylistically.

I'm open to changing, perhaps something that's a little faster at starting, but not found one that makes me go "a-ha" yet. Tilix looks like it has potential - may play with it a bit more. If I can get rid of the toolbar...

Also, alternative file manager to Dolphin with a similar feature set...

I've been using Roxterm with AwesomeWM. I don't like borders, tabs or menus on my terminal. I just want it to pop up with a key combo (Meta Enter) and disappear with a Ctl-d. Bang bang. I bounced around for a bit and settled here. I can't recall all the details but Roxterm just seemed to be the one I could config to my liking on AwesomeWM. Arch moved it to the AUR a few years ago. I guess it's fallen out of favor for some reason.

If I need a standalone window I reach for lxterminal. It's lightweight, modern enough looking, and does exactly what I need without any annoyance. Most of the time though I just use guake which as most everybody here knows is a terminal that works like old school first person shooter consoles where you press a button and it appears down from the top of your screen, press the hotkey again and it tucks back up and away. If I'm using a Mac a good alternative to guake is iTerm which has similar functionality.

wezterm, because it seems to have all the functions I want (ligatures, RGBA OSC, proper OSC support for base16) and is written in Rust, has sane configuration and nice platform support

At some point I got hooked to kde konsole because it allows you to hide everything: hide the scroll bar, hide the menu, hide the tabs. Nothing but window decoration & a terminal.

Oh and my terminal window is slightly transparent. There is a sweet spot where I can still read e.g. this text through the terminal (if need be) while not getting annoyed by the transparency.

That plus I still have all the abilities of a "fancy" terminal emulator: tabs, large scroll window, hyperlink klicking, ....

I recently started using kgx, aka console and it's a fresh breath of air tbh. Esp the purple color scheme change on the terminal tab whenever you are in a ssh shell. The red warning prompt after pasting a command with sudo in it is also a nice touch.

Didn't know the terminal could be this interactive but am liking it.

I liked blackbox and it was initially going to be my gnome-terminal replacement. If only the project was a bit more complete (has a high CPU usage bug).

urxvtd + urxvtc

I just got used to it over the years. I also have a number of extensions which I would miss. Also it is just very responsive and low on resources; same league as xterm.

Also nowadays terminfo is mostly available on remote machines; I mainly work remote (I had an odroid as local system for quite a while).

I would say, there is no reason to have a terminal which does tiling, there is tmux which brings many more features. Also, what the heck with gpu enabled terminals?

> Also, what the heck with gpu enabled terminals?

On some operating systems, prior to GPU acceleration, all existing terminal emulators were so slow that they caused noticeable and frustrating lag under some circumstances, for example running tmux with text scrolling in multiple panes.

Since then, we've seen the rise of cross-platform, performance-oriented terminal emulators (Alacritty, Kitty, Wezterm) on the one hand and tmux adopt what amounts to frame dropping in the other (check out the fork called tmux-sixel if you prefer not to have this behavior or want sixel-based terminal graphics support).

I do not understand why terminal emulator performance, especially on Windows and Mac, used to be so atrocious that only GPU-accelerated terminal emulators didn't suck there. Konsole, xterm, st, urxvt, and even GNOME Terminal have never needed to resort to that just to avoid massive flickering and lag.

xfce4-terminal, because I switched to Xfce when GNOME went on their "reinvent the UI" trek. I was happy with the UI I already had, thanks very much.

Me too, but mostly out of laziness and because its good enough once you change the color scheme, disable the menu bar and reduce font size slightly. Also set a very large scrollback buffer.

Same here. Need its tabs since it is difficult to organize many terminal windows if use rxvt. I also use LXTerminal on the same machine. It's set to dark background to make flask's debug message easier to read. LXTerminal is very lite and adds very little(or no) additional dependence on Debian.

Tilix, because it's relatively simple and doesn't get in my way with silly features (flame away konsole fanatics!)

Guake, for no reason. I tried it and fulfilled my needs.

Same here with Yakuake. It's always there

Tilix https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/

BTW, a little off topic, but...

I wish something like Windows Terminal or ConEmu was available for Linux. After Windows 10 supports will end I'm going to switch to Linux again and I wanna cry because Linux tools almost always are so feature-less, buggy, unfinished or ugly.

ShareX, Everything, terminals mentioned above. With 7+ taskbar tweaker even taskbar is much more powerful than any desktop environment I tested :(

Yeah ShareX has an absurd amount of features. Did you try Wine? Might work but not sure how friendly it is with X11/Wayland

What feature of Windows Terminal are you missing? It's been ages since I've used it but I can't think of anything I haven't seen in Linux terminal emulators. Gnome Terminal is the closest IMHO as it has custom profiles and colorschemes that are similar to what I remember from Windows. Pixel shaders are the only thing I can think that you won't commonly find in Linux terminals, but there is cool-retro-term for that kind of stuff.

Mame has a VT100 emulator and you can enable shaders with that if you want scanlines and pincushion distortion.

Oh wow I had no idea they emulated a VT100. That's awesome!

Follow up, what's the Linux terminal with the lowest latency? What about the one with the highest thru put? Debian if that matters

By latency, I guess you mean its launching speed? I like urxvt for that. I started using it back when I was on a netbook. So much quicker to launch than gnome-terminal or konsole. I didn't even need its daemon functionality which should be even quicker to open up windows.

On throughput, I guess you mean its refresh rate? Among its many options, I remember there's one about skipping drawing content when it's coming in faster than urxvt is able to draw it, in order to not slow down the program writing to it. There may be more options that affect the refresh rate.

Terminal latency is the delay between hitting a key and a glyph showing up on screen. There can be multiple layers of keyboard mapping and drawing APIs that slow this down compared to minimalistic terminal emulators from 30 years ago.

A little out of date, but useful I think: https://danluu.com/term-latency/

EDIT: Should say a lot of this is Mac

Wasn't expecting to see st be on the slower end and emacs on the faster end.

Now on i3: I used to have urxvt in daemon mode, so opening a new terminal will be faster and just launch a client.

Then moved on to alacrity and finally it is kitty now.

I just want to open my terminal fast on i3 and be able to display graphics in them (therefore kitty)

Before i3 it was urxvt with tmux. I don’t have reasons to combine tmux with i3 (e.g. resuming a session). I3 is good enough

I use xst, a fork of st. It does everything I need it to do. It's not very feature-full, but even if I had the kinds of features other terminal emulators have I wouldn't use them, so this is fine.

https://github.com/gnotclub/xst

Terminal emulator.

When I boot my laptop or PC I get a graphical login (sddm) and a whizzy environment on login - KDE n that. I can hit CTRL-Fx and get a console, a terminal if you like. It does conform to some sort of standards but is it really an emulator? Emulating something implies a second rate experience and I don't think that applies here. My terminal is just fine.

Now is my terminal a good one? Well we might have to consider the shell too because that is a major part of the text based console experience. I use BASH. I know that other shells exist and they have adherents (often quite vocal!) I've tried FISH and loved it but it isn't BASH which is available nearly everywhere. zsh, ksh etc are not bash but they are well supported so adherents are well served and we are all happy.

So I run BASH in a konsole mostly. It's just something to run commands and get stuff done. I've tried funky extras that fiddled with git n that and changed the prompt and made my console life more productive. It doesn't really and simply slows it down.

I like my shells to be unimaginative but reliable and my consoles to be pretty staid too. I like a bit of colour but not much more.

Sorry, to answer your question: konsole.

Yes, the virtual terminals on Linux (and BSD) systems are emulators. They emulate actual, physical, terminals. You are incorrect in your inference of what the notion of emulation means, furthermore. Although not in general true of terminal emulators, unfortunately, other emulators are often superior experiences to the originals.

I use Kitty!

Mainly because I wanted something a bit snappier than Tilix but configurable to basically behave the same way -- built in panes, same shortcuts, and input broadcasting. The last one took a script, but I've been happy with it.

An accelerated terminal is very helpful for watching tons of logs scroll by

I previously used kitty and had no issue, but moved to gnome terminal as kitty chewed through VRAM pretty fast on my 4k monitor setup. I use too many terminals, but gnome terminal appeared to unload vmem when moving away from a workspace, kitty did not.

For me, it's Alacritty. It's fast, it's cross platform and it's driven via an alacritty.yml config file that's easy to move between machines.

The vim like navigation of terminal output history is also handy for finding things.

I used the terminal in gVim (:terminal). It's pretty close to xterm in terms of responsiveness, supports Unicode, and lets you avoid a multiplexer like GNU screen or tmux. Fallback is good old xterm (always have a fallback).

Uninformed person here. Why is avoiding a multiplexer desirable?

It's not really "avoiding", it's more like 1 less program to install, configure, run, learn keys for, and troubleshoot. I like both tmux and screen, but I personally don't need them anymore.

- Suckless' st for its launching speed and simplicity

- Alacritty for better keycode support

st as well. Works decent, is small.

yup, same here.

Konsole. Why? Well.. I mean, I'm a KDE user anyway, and I've been using it for a long time. It "just works" and I've never felt any particular need to switch to anything else.

XTerm. It's fast and it works. I wish it could be attached as a serial terminal like st though.

Lately I've found that I'm more productive just dropping into a console with docs on an eReader though.

Gnu screen can connect to serial ports so you can use any terminal emulator as a serial terminal.

Yeah, it's just a convenience that isn't necessary at all. Moving between different systems can be annoying trying to find out if I have screen, cu, minicom etc, would be nice to just XTerm --serial /dev/ttyUSB0 or something.

Mate Terminal, mostly because it supports multiple tabs that I can switch between using the same keyboard shortcuts as in other programs. Consistent, simple. I don't need more.

termit.

I just want unicode and tabs and a way to set background and foreground colors.

I also like lxterminal and of course the emacs shell.

I did try kitty after reading this, but is failed because of my openGL configuration. Silly.

Termite, it does one thing and does it well. I have no need to graphically accelerate a black window with white text, it's good on my battery.

Since I'm fully on wayland, so foot terminal is my choice. Sometimes I use vbeterm (gtk and vte based terminal), it works for both wayland and X11.

Anything not based on libvte, it is like a CVE magnet.

Surprised to see no mention of Hyper https://hyper.is/

It's kinda slow and bloated for being a terminal emulator

Tilix: https://github.com/gnunn1/tilix

Me too, although as far as I can tell it's unmaintained at the moment.

I've been using urxvt on i3 for man years, just recently replaced it with kitty. Seems like it stays.

What made you change? And what does kitty improved for you?

vterm inside emacs.

vterm is sufficiently standard terminal emulator. Emacs plays the role of a windows manager (manages multiple vterm windows (buffers in emacs terms)). Easy to save/restore window configurations.

st. [1] Its simple and has everything I need, which is utf-8 support. Tabs and stuff i do via tmux.

[1] https://st.suckless.org/

i'd like a terminal that let's me create a multi-window layout and actually recreate that layout with exact positions and sizes every time i start it.

recommendations?

tmux?

i should have mentioned that i am running different tmux sessions in each of those terminals already. i am not looking for tmux integration to the terminal, as some of my tmux sessions are remote, so there is no real benefit.

i could run a tmux session to lay out all my other tmux sessions, but then that would add another nesting layer, when my tmux sessions are already two levels deep. i also would like each terminal to be in a separate window.

Kitty has layouts, but for terminals inside kitty's window, not DE level windows. There are some presets and you can define your own.

i tried that until i ran into a situation where i wanted one of the terminals to be next to a different app (so i could copy paste something) but i couldn't because the whole terminal app would obviously come to the top once i clicked into it. so i really prefer it to be separate windows

xst, fork of suckless st https://github.com/gnotclub/xst

Why do you people use terminal emulators?

the main reason for me is that the command shell retains a history of commands that i used which allows me to efficiently repeat those commands.

i can turn a series of commands into a script.

also a lot of commands and file operations are faster in a terminal.

there are also many commands that don't have a gui equivalent (and there are gui apps that don't have a commandline equivalent. the latter are the reason why we use terminal emulators as opposed to raw terminals(

Oh I get all of these, maybe I have some confusion about the difference between a terminal and a terminal emulator.

Take MacOS for example - there's the default Terminal app. It can do all the things you're describing out of the box and I agree that they're useful. (I would call this a terminal, not a terminal emulator <<< I guess that's the part where my terminology is wrong).

Then there's the custom setups with kitty, tmux, other extensions etc.

My question was what do people get out of the latter that isn't in the former.

oh, ok. every terminal on a gui is a terminal emulator, because a real terminal is something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT420 (i used one of those at home in the 90s, directly connected to a modem (so i had to hand dial modem commands))

basically you are asking what kind of advantages do these alternative terminal emulators have over the default.

well, just look at what everyone here is writing about their choice.

in part that depends on what the default is because on linux you get a variety of choices. there it often comes down to preference. the defaults change over time and some people prefer to stick with what they had.

if it's not that then it's some kind of specific feature. it can be font choice (better default fonts, or an easier way to change the font), tab support or something else. it's not that one terminal is objectively better than another, but a few features that are important for one person but not for another.

on macos i occasionally had issues with unicode support for foreign languages in the default terminal.app. so i switched to iTerm. iTerm also has tabs and tmux integration, which are nice extra features.

btw tmux is a terminal multiplexer offering features that no terminal application has. the primary one is that it keeps running if i close a window and i can reconnect later. that is very useful for remote connections, but also locally it means i can log out without having to close all my terminal windows. keeping that state for me is very important to make it easier to switch between activities

To be slightly more explicit, tmux is not a replacement for a terminal emulator, but rather an application that is run inside one: you can open Terminal/iTerm/Kitty/whatever you prefer, then run "tmux new" [1].

[1]: https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Getting-Started

xterm, mostly out of habit, and because it's everywhere. I'm on debian as well.

I really grew fond of terminator.

st because it is minimal and sufficient for tmux to do whatever it needs to do.

mrxvt

It has tabs and hot keys to increase / decrease the font size

wezterm

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